"We are building a computer in the same way that nature builds a brain," said Wei Lu. "The idea is to use a completely different paradigm compared to conventional computers. The cat brain sets a realistic goal because it is much simpler than a human brain but still extremely difficult to replicate in complexity and efficiency."

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

Scientists, aiming to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources, have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots.

"...the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT discovered that cross-training, which is swapping jobs with someone else on your team to help everyone understand the work better, works even when your coworker doesn't have a mind."

Robots have been trained to drink, dance, and swear. This was simply the next logical step. British Health and Safety Laboratory researchers say it will help them study the elusive spread of norovirus.

"Should we be afraid as workers that the machines are going to take away our jobs and leave us with nothing to do? No. In much the same way that tractors and steam shovels began freeing man and beast from back breaking work nearly two hundred years ago, there are many benefits for man to gain from the crowd computing revolution – the biggest being freedom from an increasing amount of mind numbing work."

CNRS Director, Peter Ford Dominey, is developing a kind of "simplified artificial brain" that reproduces certain types of so-called "recurrent" connections observed in the human brain. The artificial brain system enables the robot to learn, and subsequently understand, new sentences containing a new grammatical structure. It can link two sentences together and even predict how a sentence will end before it is uttered.

"The human brain is built so that when given the slightest hint that something is even vaguely social, or vaguely human... people will respond with an enormous array of social responses," says Stanford researcher Clifford Nas.

Launching in 2013, Goddard and his colleagues will outfit hundreds of British homes with sensors that monitor temperature, humidity, and light levels, as well as gas and electricity use, and wirelessly report their readings every minute. Using machine learning techniques, they will be able to analyze how utilities are actually used despite how users think they're using them.

The computer models simulated numerous alternative treatment paths out into the future and continually planned and replanned treatment as new information became available. In other words, it can "think like a doctor," according to the university...

The truth comes out a couple years late: IBM's Watson began swearing after memorizing the contents of the Urban Dictionary. Researcher Eric Brown and a 35-person development team were forced to delete the associated data.

"Artificial intelligence is about more than talking computers and robots in search of love and laughter. In fact, AI is most useful in its simplest form: ad hoc decision making capabilities in an embedded system."

The Standup program, engineered by a team of computer scientists in Scotland, is one of the more successful efforts to emerge from a branch of artificial intelligence known as computational humor, which seeks to model comedy using machines.

The world is getting a long-awaited first glimpse at a new humanoid robot in action mimicking the expressions of a one-year-old child. Video of robo-toddler shows him demonstrating different facial expressions, using 27 moving parts in the head alone.

The robot's ability to glide is achieved through a newly installed pump that pushes water in and out of the fish, depending on if the scientists want the robot to ascend or descend. Also, the robot's battery pack sits on a kind of rail that moves backward and forward, in sync with the pumping action, to allow the robot to glide through water on a desired path...